A new impetus for African development

By Margaret A. Novicki, Africa Recovery,May 1996 Special Issue

The Special Initiative aims to improve access to basic
education and primary health care

Agencies of the UN system have begun devising implementation
strategies for the Special Initiative on Africa, a
multi-million dollar, decade-long programme to maximize
support for African development which was launched by
Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on 15 March.

The Initiative, which commits the UN agencies and the Bretton
Woods institutions to working together in a coordinated and
synergistic fashion behind Africa's priorities, is the UN's
most significant mobilization of international support for
development in one world region.

It represents "a new approach to development cooperation which
is goal-driven and which is focused on collaboration among all
the donors for particular country-defined objectives," said
Mr. James Gustave Speth, Administrator of the UN Development
Programme and co-chair of the Special Initiative Steering
Committee. The committee met in Nairobi in late April to begin
to address implementation and resource mobilization for the
Special Initiative's 14 components.

The Initiative devotes the bulk of its resources to expanding
basic education and improving health care in Africa. It also
focuses on promoting peace and better governance, improving
water and food security, increasing the continent's
competitiveness in world trade, and making available new
information technology.

"All the agencies have worked well together to map out and
allocate our tasks for the coming l0-year programme," said Mr.
K.Y. Amoako, Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission
for Africa and co-chairman of the Steering Committee. "Our
guidelines are laid out. We begin this campaign with a clear
vision of how it will strengthen the capacity of African
societies and economies for real growth," he said.

Give development a chance

The Special Initiative's components are based on four themes
reflecting Africa's development priorities as expressed in the
Organization of African Unity's (OAU) 1995 Cairo Agenda for
action.

The first theme consists of actions which are required to
create a conducive climate for development. In those countries
wracked by war, conflict resolution, national reconciliation
and peace-building must be addressed first before any
discussion of development can take place. To support the peace
process in Africa, the Special Initiative will:

strengthen the OAU's capacity to engage in conflict
prevention, management and resolution;

strengthen selected organs of civil society engaged in
peacebuilding and the promotion of human rights and democracy;
and

promote the use of the mass media, particularly radio
broadcasting, to support peacebuilding and political
participation.

At a time when official development assistance (ODA) is on the
decline, the Special Initiative seeks to encourage the release
of more resources for Africa's development through a
combination of action and advocacy involving African and donor
countries and institutions and the UN system itself. To assist
in mobilizing the continent's internal resources, the
Initiative will focus on improving revenue collection and
domestic savings and investment. The financial intermediation
system will also be strengthened for beffer resource
allocation, and information technology for development will be
promoted to improve links between African countries, its
subregions and the rest of the world.

The Initiative will also strive to galvanize external support
for Africa's economic transition by:

encouraging multilateral and bilateral creditors to reduce
Africa's external debt burden and make it more sustainable;
encouraging African countries to manage their debt more
effectively; and encouraging the UN system, with the Secretary
General's leadership, to have a more integrated and active
strategy on African debt;

helping to lessen Africa's aid dependency by expanding trade
access, diversifying export opportunities, boosting the
inflows of foreign direct investment, and increasing the
continent's capacity to compete in the international economy;
and

Hope for the coming generation

The major thrust of the Special Initiative, involving its
largest resource commitment, is on greatly increasing the
provision of basic education and health care so that African
children will have improved opportunities for the future.
Accomplishment of these goals will also have a positive impact
on the empowerment of women and hence on development through
a more manageable population growth-rate and enhanced human
welfare.

The Special Initiative will conduct a 10-year effort to ensure
basic education for all children, with a special emphasis on
girls, and literacy and numeracy for women. Evidence has shown
that basic education is the best possible development
investment, strongly correlated to greater participation in
democracy, more productive farmers, better family planning and
higher incomes. The World Bank will lead in the financial
mobilization of this component, which, at between $12.5 bn and
$15.5 bn, is the Initiative's largest.

The Bank and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization have already organized consultations on the
education sector with African governments and donors, and the
Donor Association for African Education is preparing a
proposal on its role in support of the Initiative.

The Initiative will also include a campaign to reform the
health sector, which will involve boosting the capacity of
Africa's health systems to reduce, on a sustainable basis, the
most common causes of morbidity and mortality. The coverage,
quality and access to primary health care services will be
expanded specially targeting the most common preventable
and/or treatable diseases.

Coordination meetings on the health sector have been convened
in Brazzaville, Congo, by the World Health Organization's
regional office for Africa, and a preliminary health strategy
has been mapped out. WHO has invited the other cooperating
agencies in the health sector to devise an implementation
strategy.

The Initiative also addresses poverty reduction by the
promotion of employment and sustainable livelihoods, with
efforts concentrated on the informal sector, which employs
about 60 per cent of Africa's labour force, and on
environmentally marginal areas.

Strengthening governance

African leaders' efforts to improve governance will be
bolstered under the Initiative by supporting Africa's civil
service to better manage development, helping build
independent judicial systems, supporting the functioning of
parlia- meets and electoral processes, and making public
administration more accountable. The Initiative will also seek
to strengthen the capacities of civil society to be more
active in development and policy-making, including
peace-building and conflict resolution.

Urgency on survival

Africa faces a formidable challenge in balancing the
interrelated issues of food production, population growth and
protection of its fragile environment from further damage. The
Initiative places special emphasis on the need to control land
degradation and desertification, encourage irrigation, improve
soil quality, and support the role of women in food
production. It also focuses on providing safe water for
drinking and sanitation.

Consultations have begun among the cooperating agencies on
defining a strategy and outlining proposals for implementation
of the water component, and a framework for action and a
workplan will be presented to the Steering Committee. And the
working group on food production will soon finalize its
implementation strategy.

Resource mobilization

The Initiative's components are of two types: those which
require substantial resource mobilization and implementation
and those which call primarily for a strengthening and
rationalization of existing efforts. The cumulative financial
resources required over a 10-year period are estimated at up
to $25 bn, most of which will come from a redirection of
existing resources in African national budgets and
reallocations of existing levels of multilateral and bilateral
ODA.

To this end, the Initiative contains three new mechanisms
which are designed to help rationalize development assistance
to Africa and maximize its impact. First, multilateral and
bilateral donors will create goal-oriented regional forums to
raise resources for key sectors. Second, African governments
will prepare goal-oriented country investment programrnes to
maximize the impact of resource mobilization. Third,
participation in Consultative Group and Roundtable meetings is
to be broadened to include non-traditional partners, such as
leaders of business and civil society.

The Initiative also recommends other ways of releasing funds
for development, including deeper debt relief, an expansion of
Africa's trade opportunities, and enhanced South-South
cooperation.

This all-encompassing effort to enhance Africa's development
possibilities will require strong international support-and an
effective partnership with donor countries and institutions-to
achieve its goals, say UN agency officials. A one-year
mobilization of political support has hence been launched to
raise Africa's priority status on the international agenda.

"We will all be making a concerted effort over the coming year
through a series of parallel initiatives to elevate the
attention [paid to] Africa on the international agenda and to
mobilize additional support for Africa and for this
Initiahve," said Mr. Speth, UNDP Administrator.

Note: The May 1996 issue also contains other articles on the
Special Initiative, on the Global Coalition for Africa, and
other topics, including Zaire, Burkina Faso, AIDS, debt, and
UNCTAD IX. Africa Recovery is not yet available on-line.
Annual subscriptions are available to individuals for $20 and
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Contact Editor, Africa Recovery, Room S-931, United Nations,
NY 10017 USA. Tel: (212) 963-6857; fax: (212) 963-4556;
e-mail: unafrica@undp.org.

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